How are you drawing the text? That's the important part. Depending on the API and how things are configured, the text may or may not get rasterized in the PDF.
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Kurt RevisMay 12 '12 at 2:12

Updated the example to show it exactly. What other APIs are there? I tried [CALayer renderInContext] and a few others... all rasterized. What's the library where it's not?
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RalphleonMay 12 '12 at 6:45

If you checked the pdf standard specification you'd see that you'd actually need to echo something like Tj(ABC) to the file to make it show unrasterized text. I'm not aware of any pdf creation libraries for iOS.
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EimantasMay 12 '12 at 6:49

Like you, I would expect -[NSString drawInRect:withFont:] to render the text as text. Not sure why it isn't -- are you using a weird font, or shadows, or color? -[CALayer renderInContext:] would definitely rasterize, since CALayers are all about bitmaps; you definitely don't want that.
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Kurt RevisMay 12 '12 at 18:48